The Evolution of Expressive Culture

David G. Hays

Abstract: The capacity for integration of personality and formation of character
changes in cultural evolution. Mechanisms of ego defense arisewith literacy,
and mechanisms of reorganization arise in and after the Renaissance. Expressive
culture, consisting of religions, magics, arts, and entertainments, etc.,
differentiate correspondingly. At present, levels of art, entertainment,
and diversion can be distinguished by the demands they make on their audiences,
and by their effects. Neurologically, the problem may be to bring cortical
goals, such as the need for beauty, truth, love, and justice into concordance
with animal goals, such as the need for security, sustenance, sex, and
sociality. The difficulty of this problem is reflected in the prevalence
of perversions.

. . . their variety in animation exhilarates; you are interested without
knowing how to label the emotion . . . I think that this direct enjoyment
of dancing as an activity is the central aspect of ballet style that Balanchine
has rediscovered [Denby 1949, p. 116].

We have no call to be surprised if the philosophers, historians, and psychologists
of the modern world neglect our emotional life, nor even to be much amazed
by Freud's extraordinary assertion that psychoanalysis has little to say
about the emotions. For indeed the central fact about the emotional life
of the West is neglect, disregard, and systemic suppression.

When our remote ancestors began to experience awareness, they must quickly
have realized that they had to deal with an enormous problem that originated
within themselves. Their impulses to rape, murder, dominate--take what
appealed from whoever possessed it--these impulses were unpredictable,
uncontrollable, inexplicable, a torment to the conscious soul. And they
were likewise destructive to social life. A community of such persons cannot
long endure, and in community there is strength. For fifty thousand years,
more or less, our ancestors have done the best they could to pull themselves
together--to integrate the impulsive life of the animal with the contemplative
life of the angelic higher self. To that end they have created art and
entertainment, ritual and religion, philosophy, and psychology. They have
also fallen, many times and in spite of their efforts, into perversions.

In America at the end of the twentieth century, two opposed tendencies
are apparent. The disregard of emotions, which has become stronger and
stronger during the last five hundred years, is opposed by a movement to
religions, magic, drugs, sexual freedom, and the bodily delights of neo-athleticism.
This movement, which began as a revolution in the 1960s, is changing--perhaps
collapsing, perhaps reorganizing on a more solid foundation. Whether or
not it continues, it has been a harbinger of the end of Western success
through emotionlessness. The future does not belong to emotionless cultures;
the West must accept emotion or surrender the future.

When situations such as this one arise, the need for understanding becomes
urgent. If free emotionality is a horror, then yielding emotional purity
in hope of gaining the future is selling one's real mess of pottage for
an illusory birthright. If, on the other hand, the evolution of cognitive
powers has reached a level that makes it possible for ordinary individuals
to maintain 'artistic control' over emotional expression, then the acceptance
of impulse, and with that a leading role in future history, is a double
gain. The issue is significant; it is also intricate, and to achieve understanding
will require a substantial effort. The concepts and evidence have to be
drawn from the several sciences that study our species as a psychic, biological,
and social entity. This paper can at most offer a sketch of a framework
for investigations yet to be made.

Work toward the writing of this paper began ten years ago, when I moved
to New York City and started attending performances of the New York City
Ballet. A semiotician specialized in ballet had told me that this company
was unquestionably the best in the world. Arlene Croce, reviewing a new
ballet by George Balanchine, Robert Schumann's Davidsbundertanze
, in The New Yorker (1980), hinted that the work was somehow more
than a ballet [Endnote 1]. For several years I attended almost all of the
130 repertoire performances that the company gives in New York; thereafter,
my frequency slowly diminished to roughly twenty performances a year.

The recognition that Balanchine holds about the same place in the history
of ballet that Michelangelo or Leonardo holds in the history of plastic
arts came quickly [Endnote 2]. Hubert Saal set Balanchine "beside
Picasso and Stravinsky" and concluded that "his most awesome
achievement was that he elevated ballet almost single-handedly from a place
below the salt to a seat at the head of the table" (Newsweek
, May 9,1983, quoted by Buckle & Taras, 1988, p. 326). To put the matter
more directly, he converted a somewhat disreputable amusement into an art
(After all, the female dancers are practically nude, and frequently take
positions with their legs spread far apart, the bodies grossly exposed).

Balanchine's working career was long (Taper 1963/1984): born in 1904, he
began making ballets in Russia in 1920,, and made ballets in New York until
1982; he died in 1983. During that time, techniques for training the body
advanced remarkably: In athletics (Mandell 1984), gymnastics, circus, and
also in dance. Around 1900, I have heard, ballet dancers took several musical
beats to move into a position, which they then held in tableau [Endnote
3]. Taper (p. 360) quotes Balanchine: "If present-day critics and
audiences could actually see Apollo as it was performed in 1928,
'they would laugh their heads off at how it used to be.'" At the peak
of his career, Balanchine made dances in which there was no time between
steps for preparation; other choreographers still allowed a pause between
movements so that the dancer could shift from the end pose of one movement
to the start pose of the next, but not he. Reynolds (p. 98) quotes Maria
Tallchief on Firebird (1949): "it was practically impossible.
The variation contained many low, fast jumps, near the floor, lots of quick
footwork, sudden changes of direction, off-balance turns, turns from pointe
to pointe, turned-in, turned-out positions, one after another. It was another
way of moving . . . There was no time."

In London, G. B. L. Wilson, a critic, wrote in Dance News that Balanchine
offended. "Similarly our hips must always be level--to be otherwise
is an affront to sensibility. And when we see one of Mr. Balanchine's girls
raise her leg vertically and raise her hip to get it there, a shiver of
horror runs through the audience". Balanchine's reply, to Alexander
Bland of The Observer , was that in England, "if you are awake
it is already vulgar." Mr. Bland was not amused. (The story is told
by Taper, p. 370.) Certainly in ballet before Balanchine the shoulders,
pelvis, and backbone were generally held in stiff alignment, whereas Balanchine's
dances require twists and curves of many kinds [Endnote 4].

Before Balanchine, dancers might move their legs and hold their arms in
fixed position; or move their arms and keep their legs still or in a simple
repetitive motion. Balanchine requires his dancers to coordinate, in elaborate
ways, movements of trunk, arms, legs, and hands. Among the effects that
he achieves, some are powerfully sexual. Looking at the City Ballet on
stage, one has the impression that every muscle in every body in the company
is at all times executing exactly the movement that Balanchine intended.
One may also have the impression that the dancers are weightless and perfectly
free to move as they please--although they are in fact working near the
limit of human endurance under absolute discipline.

Thus a great genius, working in a period when the material--human neuromusculature
control--was rapidly improving, took advantage of better technical control
to achieve higher artistic control, and took advantage of artistic incorporate
material which, without control, would have been pornographic [Endnote
5].

But this discussion leaves untouched the central question: Why and how
does ballet achieve its powerful effect? At a typical performance of the
City Ballet, a large part of the audience are naive. They are not familiar
with the pieces being danced; many have never seen them before (the intake
of breath that can be heard when the curtain rises on an effective stage
set is evidence enough). They are not much expert in the art; the accounts
that are published in newspapers and magazines are generally superficial,
often in my judgment missing the essence of the work altogether. Audiences
give ovations for performances that seem to me mediocre. Yet the difference
in the crowd between entrance and exit is almost tangible. Watching the
ballet has changed their mood in a favorable way. Is such a change to be
seen between those entering and leaving a great museum of painting or sculpture?

A clue appears in a work that is highly idiosyncratic in both substance
and form, Peter A. Bucknell's (1979) Entertainment and Ritual 600 to
1600. He deals only with England, and says (p. 189):

The 'magic' contained in these dances was something that even the dancer
could not explain or understand. Because there was something outside the
world around him which only dancing seemed to contact--like private prayer-so
dancing was pursued in secret.

In secret, but not in solitude. The people of a village would go into the
woods at night to dance together, as the people of bands and villages have
danced, probably, through the whole history of our species. Bucknell quotes
Stubbes (Anatomy of Abuses , 2nd ed, 1583) to the effect that two-thirds
of the girls who spend the night in the woods around the Maypole are "violated"
(p. 185). Such activities are not acceptable to Catholic religion, or to
the Anglican Church that followed it in England; and the Church was inordinately
powerful in England at the time. But, reports Bucknell, the Church could
not stop these dances (p. 186).

My intention is not to emphasize the sexuality; it is the 'magic' that
I think most important [Endnote 6]. Balanchine captured that magic, brought
it under artistic control, and the New York City audience comes into contact
with something "outside the world around." For an audience that
probably cannot achieve that contact by prayer, the effect is truly spectacular.
Without the artistic control, and the creative genius, Balanchine's predecessors
and contemporaries achieved effects of a much lower order.

So now I must ask, what is that 'magic', what is it outside the world around
us, how can we achieve artistic control and so have freedom of emotional
expression and the accompanying rewards at our personal disposal? How can
the genius of Balanchine become the routine of everyone's everyday life?
Or is emotion only to be "recollected in tranquillity" (Wordsworth,
1800) by civilized persons? Must we look into our animal selves through
the filter of art, constructed only by the rare genius who immolates himself
to produce it, or dare we look directly?

In 1970, Paul D. MacLean published an analysis of the human brain into
three parts, thus, a 'triune' brain These parts were reptilian, old mammalian,
and new. Without, I hope, doing much violence to either party, we can associate
MacLean's reptilian brain with Freud's Id, the "It" that cannot
itself be conscious but has a powerful effect on the contents and movements
of conscious thought [Endnote 7]. The reptilian brain, unlike the Id, is
a concrete thing that can be dissected out. By its substance and configuration,
it resembles the brain of our reptilian ancestors. Note that it is larger
than the brain of a reptile; we are more reptilian than the snakes. Being
a neural thing, it is capable of triggering activity, both in the parts
of the brain to which it is connected and in the body. When its actions
trigger a specific pattern of activity in the more modem parts of the brain,
I say that it has fixed a 'mode'. But what of movements?

Charles Darwin wrote a book (1872/1979) about The Expression of Emotions
in Man and Animals. Chapter III begins thus:

We now come to our third Principle, namely, that certain actions, which
we recognise as expressive of certain states of the mind, are the direct
result of the constitution of the nervous system, and have been from the
first independent of the will, and, to a large extent, of habit. . . .
Of course every movement which we make is determined by the constitution
of the nervous system; but actions performed in obedience to the will,
or through habit, or through the principle of antithesis, are here as far
as possible excluded. Our present subject is very obscure, but, from its
importance, must be discussed at some little length; and it is always advisable
to perceive clearly our ignorance. (p. 66)

Darwin's "states of the mind" are modes for me, and I shall turn
to them next. First, however, let us take an example of movement (this
one stands out because most of Darwin's examples concern pain, fear, and
rage) (pp. 75-76):

Under a transport of Joy or of vivid Pleasure, there is a strong tendency
to various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds.
We see this in our young children, in their loud laughter, clapping of
hands, and jumping for joy; in the bounding and barking of a dog when going
for a walk with his master; and in the frisking of a horse when turned
out into an open field. Joy quickens the circulation, and this stimulates
the brain, which again reacts on the whole body. . . . It deserves notice,
that it is chiefly the anticipation of a pleasure, and not its actual enjoyment,
which leads to purposeless and extravagant movements of the body, and to
the utterance of various sounds. We see this in our children when they
expect any great pleasure or treat; and dogs, which have been bounding
about at the sight of a plate of food, when they get it do not show their
delight by any outward sign, not even by wagging their tails.

Eating a plate of ice-cream (or dog food) is almost impossible if one bounds
about; and furthermore, I suggest, the anticipation and the consummation
are in different modes. Darwin concludes (p. 350):

On the other hand [as against certain habituated movements], many of the
effects due to the excitement of the nervous system seem to be quite independent
of the flow of nerve-force along the channels which have been rendered
habitual by former exertions of the will. Such effects, which often reveal
the state of mind of the person thus affected, cannot at present be explained;
for instance, the change of colour in the hair from extreme terror or grief,--the
cold sweat and the trembling of the muscles from fear,--the modified secretions
of the intestinal canal,--and the failure of certain glands to act. (p.
350)

Not every one of Darwin's facts is credible to me. (He reports, at second
hand, loss of hair color in a man during the hour before his execution).
And by and large his explanatory mechanisms are inadequate by the standards
of contemporary neurology. Nevertheless, his broad scheme makes sense to
me, and fits into both MacLean's theory of a reptilian brain and my views
about ballet.

If the cavorting of a child anywhere in time, space, and culture is recognizable
at a glance; and if the cavorting of the child resembles that of horse
or dog; then ought we not agree with Darwin that the cavorting is in "the
constitution of the nervous system"? That is to say, the pattern of
movement is genetically fixed; a program of behavior, a fixed or modal
action pattern [Endnote 8], is carried by the genome and realized during
growth of the embryo. And if we do agree, then ought we not place these
patterns of action in MacLean's reptilian or old mammalian brain? As these
ancient components evolved, they may well have acquired new patterns; but
the new patterns would have to be like the original in several respects:
they must be triggered by simple analyses of the perceptual field and internal
state, they must be composed of simple movements, and they must have very
high capacity to execute on appropriate occasions regardless of conscious
intent or "will." How many of us can avoid trembling or sweating
when severely frightened? And how difficult it to constrain a child from
cavorting when it feels appropriate to the child but not to the parent.
Adults in the West have so perfected the control of impulse that the reader
may even doubt the intensity with which the reptilian brain can urge behavior,
and the amount of effort that everyone in the West, the reader included,
expends every day in impulse control. I shall return to this point after
presenting modes and modal switching.

The concept of mode comes from a paper by Kilmer, McCulloch, and Slum (1969).
Warren McCulloch was a brilliant mathematician, and the paper had a formal
object. But it introduced the idea that animals switch into modes, and
while in a given mode focus their perceptions and actions toward a single
purpose. Several of the modes that they listed belong to bathroom or bedroom,
but among the others are grooming and nursing. Grooming is social behavior,
and is to be seen in our species as well as in others. Nursing concentrates
the attention of mothers at all levels, except for those mothers among
us who can continue a technical conversation while giving the nipple to
their young. Eating is a mode; but we have so far lost the custom of eating
in eating mode that a brilliant chef once had to demand, or so it is said,
that those who ate his food refrain from business conversation while eating.
Etiquette is either the artistic control that permits us to eat in eating
mode without giving mutual offense, or the artificial shell that blocks
us out of eating mode, and which it is may vary over times and places.
William L. Benzon once suggested, in private communication, that grace
before meals facilitates the switch into eating mode.

Other modes, which seem to have no ancient source, are reading, talking,
doing arithmetic, and so on. An opera singer, in a recital that I attended
in Buffalo, talked to her audience; then turned her head toward the floor
and folded her hands while the pianist played introductory bars; and then
sang. Her pause, suggesting withdrawal, may have facilitated her switch
into the mode necessary for singing. Stage fright, which seems to occur
during the final preparations for performance, may be a sign of modal switching;
if so, it is one of many hints that the process of switching is threatening
and disorienting.

A modern interpretation of modes (Benzon and Hays, 1988, p. 297) would
have it that, in a given mode, a specific combination of areas of the brain
is active:

The idea that differential activation of various brain areas subserves
modal commitment is made particularly vivid by recent techniques for displaying
patterns of blood flow in the cortex (Lassen, Ingvar & Skinhoj, 1978),
which show differences in patterns of neocortical activation according
to such behavioral modes as voluntary movement, speaking, reading silently,
reading aloud.

The cortex is powerful for analysis (both digital or "linear"
and figural or "holistic") and for planning. In a village or
any larger community, cortical work is necessary to obtain a mate. The
reptilian brain may somehow influence the selection of goals: The cortex
cannot plan to obtain a mate and plan to obtain a higher salary all at
once, and the Id puts sex before money. But as Darwin said, "Our present
subject is very obscure, . . . and it is always advisable to perceive clearly
our ignorance."

What may be a little less obscure is the capacity of the reptilian brain
for getting into consummatory modes once the consent of a mate has been
obtained. Grooming and sexual modes would then be appropriate:

Modes [such as these] are effected by facilitating information processing
in those areas of the brain which are most relevant to the corresponding
behavior and by turning control over to the appropriate neural centres
(such as the limbic system and its evolutionary precursors; MacLean, 1978;
Olds, 1977; Pribram, 1971). (Benzon and Hays 1988:297)

Broadly speaking, the most primitive part of the brain, the reticular formation,
seems to be like a person who knows where to go but cannot drive; the solution
is to catch a taxi and give the driver the address. So the older part of
the brain is the passenger, the newer part is the vehicle; and this relationship
seems to hold for several levels, each older part nested within a newer
part. The "motivational" relationship between levels can be formulated,
then, in a vehicular principle (this concept is the product of conversations
between Benzon and me). During the last few years, a good many clues have
been turned up about the means that passenger components can use in setting
the modes of their vehicles--via hormones, for example, that appear from
time to time in the brain:

It has long been inferred that the sex steroids sensitize certain constellations
of neurons for participation in patterning the experience and expression
of sexual forms of behavior. In terms of computers it was as though these
substances allowed the organism to switch programs for a special set of
operations. (MacLean 1990, p. 345)

The number of hormones is large, as might be expected for such an elaborate
business as the conduct of life on earth.

The natural event, apparently, would be for the older parts of the brain
to influence the higher parts to formulate and carry out plans for getting
a mate, and then for lower parts (above the reticular formation but below
the cortex) to be given control to execute their genetically inherited
programs, their modal action patterns, for grooming and sexual intercourse.
This does not appear to be the actual course of events for some persons
in modern Western culture. Instead, the higher parts seem often to retain
control when they should surrender it, to manage tasks for which they have
no modal action patterns--to 'simulate' the activity of the lower area.

We have become accustomed in this century to the idea that the higher part
of the brain might suppress the impulses of the lower, and that psychopathology
can be the result. But mostly we assume that the higher, or angelic, part
simply blocks sexual activity altogether. Celibacy is understandable in
these terms, and a doctrine of sublimation as the driving force of art
has received widespread acceptance. But my point is that, as the eater
may take nourishment without entering the eating mode, so the sexual partner
may carry out the act to completion without switching into sexual mode.
The origins and consequences of this phenomenon are my next topic. For
I believe that the most bitter conflicts in human experience are not conflicts
between competing goals of the same level (as discussed by Powers, 1973,
pp. 253-259), but the conflicts between reptilian and modern brain--between
reticular formation and limbic system on the side of the ape, and cortex
on the side of the angels.

The problems that appeared as soon as our ancestors became aware of problems
or anything else had not disappeared by the time Shakespeare wrote his
sonnet 129 on "Lust in Action" (Benzon, 1981). The man he described
was driven by impulse into sexual activity, and one imagines him obtaining
a mate by means little short of rape. But immediately after gratification
he feels the weight of conscience. He is displeased with himself, but when
the cycle is complete it begins again; he cannot quell his impulses any
more than the Church could stop the night-time dances in the woods. Thus
the lusty Elizabethan, whose free-and-easy life is perhaps an invention
of later, better-controlled but less gratified, romantics who had not understood
enough of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare wrote as England was passing from the cognitive systems found
in "Rank 2" to those of "Rank 3" (Benzon and Hays,
1990). Rank 2 is literate; Rank 3 can routinely perform mental arithmetic.
In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare has a Clown who suffers from the
difficulty of acquiring arithmetic:

The Kittredge note says that the phrase beginning 'leven wether tods
may be paraphrased "eleven wethers (castrated rams) will yield a tod
(28 lbs.) of wool)". But the notes fail to explain that compters
were small stones moved about on a board marked in spaces to help arithmetic
(from which practice comes the word "counter" for the merchant's
bench). The issue of arithmetic was, presumably, topical at that time.
Rank 3 produced science, rational bureaucracy, the industrial revolution;
all beyond the capacity of Rank 2 thought.

Rank 3 also produced Victorian morality [Endnote 9] and The Man in the
Grey Flannel Suit (Sloan Wilson, 1955), equally beyond Rank 2. The
changes are so broad and deep as to defy summary; think of the new conception
of government embodied in the American Declaration of Independence
and Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of
Man and the Citizen . Think of the laws of war and the Geneva Convention
, lending for the first time protection to the civilian who was, earlier,
a free target for rape and rapine, torture, and murder by any passing army;
and leading also to restriction on the torture and murder of prisoners.
Think of nation states, social security, universal high school education
and widespread college education. Think of anti-trust laws and progressive
income tax to redistribute income, raising the standard of living of the
poor. The world does not operate in accordance with these high standards
(see the UN Development Program's annual Human Development Report
for estimates), but the standards are rarely contested in modern countries
and they are obeyed to an extent that only the most optimistic could have
foreseen.

The everyday behavior of the average person in a country managed (in significant
part) by Rank 3 thinkers seems to me on the whole morally superior to what
is found in countries managed by Rank 2 thinkers. In spite of extensive,
shrill publicity given to crime in the streets of New York, much of the
city is still safer for a woman alone at night than, I think, any part
of London in 1600. One is less likely to suffer injury or humiliation here
and now than one was there and then. Rank 3 manages to control its violent
impulses [Endnote 10].

Given the power and urgency of those impulses, generated in the oldest
part of the brain, the primary psychodynamic problem of our conscious species
is to find a modus vivendi. The modern cortex has the neurological linkages
necessary to control the impulses, to cut them off from overt behavior
and even from consciousness. But mechanisms had to be invented, making
use of those connections. With each rank of cognitive evolution, the power
and subtlety of the mechanisms that can be constructed and executed routinely
has risen. The quest for mechanisms is driven, in the large, by the necessity
of social life for a species that has a poor life expectancy in isolation.
In the small, what drives the quest is a set of cortical goals that has
been revealed, little by little, in the course of cognitive evolution.

For Rank 3, it is possible to recognize that each quadrant of the cerebral
cortex has its own genetically determined goal. The system of thought at
this rank can sort out cortical modes with enough precision to permit each
of these goals to manifest itself. In Rank 2, the goals were less distinctly
visible; in Rank 4, the goal structure of the cortex may someday be seen
far more clearly. For the moment, we can see that we have innate cravings
for beauty, truth, love, and justice; and that we are ready to undertake
adventure, play, love, and work to attain those goals (respectively).

To say that a biological species has an innate goal is to suggest that
some dire consequence would be inevitable without it. Without the water
that animals crave, their internal environments go awry and death follows.
Without the sexual activity that animals above a certain evolutionary level
all seek, their species would disappear. Without beauty, truth, love, and
justice, the delicate information-processing activities of the human brain
go out of kilter and the system crashes. Not all system crashes are immediately
lethal, but they reduce the likelihood of leaving progeny; so nature selects
for systems with these goals. To put the matter somewhat differently, beauty,
truth, love, and justice are measures of the effectiveness of the intellection
that must meet the practical requirements of physical, social, and internal
systems.

The concept of "will" that Darwin uses is not much evident in
contemporary psychological theory, but I do not hesitate to characterize
the cortex as functioning in the manner of control systems (Powers, 1973).
This cybernetic concept is not in any sense ethereal; it is necessary to
the engineering of all the advanced equipment that we are proud of, from
radio receivers to spaceships. Every control system is an assembly of parts
so linked as to achieve a purpose. The purposes of our cybernetic machines
are determined by engineers; we may assume that many purposes of the cerebral
cortex are determined by cultures, and that only the facts of cultural
evolution limit what these purposes may be. But we have no reason to deny
the existence of genetic mechanisms that determine high-level goals in
the cortex, prior to the acquisition of any culture whatsoever. In fact,
the acquisition of culture would seem to presuppose the goal of acquiring
it.

The cortex is well supplied with channels of input from both the interior
of the body (including the brain) and the external environment. Thus, the
cortex can detect a person nearby, a trembling in the limbs, and a mood
of yearning. The modern person, on such an occasion, processes all that
input against a background of personal and vicarious experience, reaching
the conclusion "I desire" or "I love" that nearby person.
But what if the brain concludes that beauty, truth, love, and justice would
not be properly achieved by sexual intercourse with a person who is available
and prompts the reptilian impulse? Self-condemnation follows, and the impulse
is stifled.

By some such interaction as this, the cortex and the reptilian brain are
at cross-purposes. Their goals are different, their analyses of any momentaneous
situation are different, and all too often one says "Act!" while
the other condemns action. (The reptilian brain may oppose action if it
is afraid, while the cortex deems action feasible and necessary.) For fifty
thousand years, this dilemma has persisted; it antedated culture, and seems
to me to have given as much impetus as any other source gave to the drive
toward formation and enhancement of culture; the one certainty on earth
is that one must live with oneself until death, and the dilemma that I
am investigating is precisely how to do that.

The consequence of failure to compromise the conflict between ape and angel
is, if the ape wins, self-condemnation, and if the angel wins, the pain
of frustration that transmutes into cruelty, self-destruction, and other
perversions. In only a few of us has either side ever won the battle permanently;
those few are called saints, devils, ascetics, mystics, psychopaths, sociopaths,
and so on. Almost all of us fit, to some degree, the pattern of Shakespeare's
sonnet: Able to achieve neither perfect release nor perfect self-mastery.

The profound affinity between play and order is perhaps the reason why
play . . . seems to lie to such a large extent in the field of aesthetics.
Play has a tendency to be beautiful [Huizinga, 1955, p. 10].

As a working hypothesis, I posit that the differentiation of cortical modes
has increased from rank to rank. In Rank 1, oral culture, the only kind
that existed on earth until some three to five thousand years ago, no ordinary
person ever entered a mode in which one quadrant was regnant, with the
others active only in support of it. Speech, I suggest, was achieved by
imposing cognitive-instrumental content on a vocal-auditory call system
which, previously, had been used only for social integration of emotional
states (cf. Benzon and Hays, 1988, p.3 14; Corballis 1991, Donald 1991,
pp. 38-39) [Endnote 11]. What this means is that chanting was readily available;
it needed only the omission of the cognitive overlay, and omission is easy.
Wailing together after a death, singing together before sex, and boasting
(wordlessly) together before a fight would mobilize the sociality that
is one of our most salient biological characteristics. Although cultures
of this rank have been described by Western visitors who came to them before
much of other cultures had filtered in, I know of no source for the statement
that I must now make, for discussions of inward experience are very little
to be found in the ethnographic literature. I speculate, therefore, that
sociality, aroused by rhythmic vocalization with the whole band in a single
mode, yielded for the individual participant a sense of inner integrity,
and gave sanction for release of the most powerful impulses--sex, rage,
and grief--with some degree of social selection of targets. In Rank 1,
society is the sole source of personal coherence.

Movement requires a different account. Our species emerged with modal action
patterns from its ancestry, and with a rather new capacity for direct guidance
of movement by the cerebral cortex. The eye-hand coordination that we exploit
in all skilled doing requires cortical involvement, because no lower level
can make a sufficiently refined analysis of visual input. Nor, I think,
can lower levels generate such a great diversity of fine, exactly controlled
movements (cf. Calvin, 1983). Modal action patterns of grooming, nursing,
sexual coupling, and so on, provide no generalized basis for manipulation
and navigation (bipedal walking). A flow of sound can be modulated to carry
any information whatsoever, but the specific actions of emotional modes
cannot be exploited in the formation of a repertoire of skills.

Human adult manipulation and navigation are therefore not overlaid on antecedent
modal patterns as speech is overlaid as a modulation on the antecedent
vocal call system. There is, however, a contrary possibility: That movements
which, released in full, would constitute the modal action patterns of
emotional modes, can be released in part as modifiers of cortically controlled
movements. These movements are, in my opinion, the source of the spatiotemporal
curves that Manfred Clynes (1970; cf. 1982) elicited in association with
the words "love, sex, anger, reverence, grief, joy." He called
these curves essentic forms [Endnote 12]. His technique read the curves
from pressure exerted by a forefinger; Darwin wrote of jumping with joy,
an event familiar to everyone. I have the impression that Darwin and Clynes
were observing behaviors generated from a single source, but restricted
to the finger by neural gates in Clynes's setup.

Dancing in Rank 1 might therefore be either the emission of an essentic
form, or the modulation of gross body movements by an essentic form, by
all the members of a group at once. What seems most plausible to me at
this time is that both of these, and mixtures of them, have occurred. The
result, in any case, would be stimulation of the sense of sociality.

Two other capacities of the nervous system are relevant. One is synchrony
(William Condon & Sander, 1974a, 1974b). Our species can come in on
the beat without a conductor, quickly and easily, and does so in the course
of ordinary social conversation, beginning on the first day of life. A
human listener moving a hand or foot times the movements to the beat of
the speaker. Looking at couples moving about in public spaces, I have observed
a high proportion walking in step. Both singing and dancing together heighten
social synchrony; and I speculate that synchrony is the main channel of
awareness of sociality.

And there is also the fundamental significance of cycle time in the nervous
system. Each of Clynes's essentic forms has a characteristic duration.
For heartbeat or breathing to speed up or slowdown a little has emotional
significance. The rate of repetition of dance steps or chant syllables
must be tied closely to these biologically determined rates.

Rank 1 cultures have produced clay figurines, sculptures in wood and soapstone,
trinkets of metal, and other objects. Gombrich (1960/1969) interprets these
as replications, not representations, of nature [Endnote 13]. The clay
animal has, in a magical sense, the same significance as the living animal.

In brief, then, the participant in Rank 1 culture has scant information
processing techniques for the analysis of perception, the formulation and
execution of movements, and the interpretation of experience. Such a person
undergoes modal switches with little capacity to control them and little
understanding of them; what control exists is mainly in the group and not
the individual. To maintain the sense of a continuous self is not easy
(Benzon suggests, privately), and some of their lore is directed to that
end. But fears and confusions are hard to manage, and failure leads to
perversions: warfare between small neighboring groups, torture, cruel tattooing
of young boys, disfigurement of male and female genitalia, and so on through
a long repertoire. Cannibalism is a disputed topic, but headhunting and
human sacrifice are not disputed at all. One study, much criticized, has
it that in some eighty percent of Rank 1 cultures, some thirty percent
of males die violently in youth, and the sex ratio is balanced by female
infanticide (Divale, 1970). An example ready to hand concerns the Yir Yoront
of Australia:

During the 1930's their raiding and fighting, their trading and stealing
of women, their evisceration and two- or three-year care of their dead,
their totemic ceremonies continued apparently uninhibited by western influences.
In 1931 they killed a European who wandered into their territory from the
east, . . . In 1934, the anthropologist observed a case of extra-tribal
revenge cannibalism [Sharp, 1952/1965, p. 72].

Sharp, the author of a 1934 ethnography of these people, is presumably
himself "the anthropologist" cited.

Taking all these unpleasant facts as a measure of the inadequacy of Rank
1 methods of personality integration, and assuming that the internal experience
that drove this behavior was as unpleasant for them as their conduct is
for us, we can well conclude that many persons had strong reason to think
out better ways of living. Rank 1 made two essential contributions to human
progress: First, it maintained over a very long period a rate of population
growth that forced humanity to spread over the entire useable surface of
the earth, displaying the competence required for survival in a long sequence
of new environments; that broad range enhanced the species's hope of long-term
survival. Second, as population density rose at the center, Rank 1 cultures
found a way of producing enough food for survival; and when the density
was high enough, Rank 2 emerged. Given the cognitive and emotional limitations
of Rank 1, these achievements are among the most laudable in all history.

In comparing Rank 2 with Rank 1, we can make a long list of differences.
Rank 2 did (and does) live by agriculture; lives in cities and their environs;
writes; uses the wheel and the plow; keeps domesticated animals for meat
and to pull the plow and cart; makes and fires clay pots; uses metal tools;
and eventually grinds its corn and presses its grapes and olives with the
power of water or animals.

What interests me here, however, is the appearance (in the Mediterranean
basin) of Hebrew religion and of Greek philosophy and an All appeared after
writing was well established and after a form of governance that Leslie
White (1959) called the church-state had superseded, in Egypt, Mesopotamia,
and Greece, the familistic governance of chiefdoms. The paramount chief
of a group of villages is a big father; the great one in a church-state
is a god-king, a living idol--who may, however, lead the worship of a stone
idol greater than himself. This vast generalization from family ties expands
the sense of sociality, but gives only a finite sense. The transformation
made by the Hebrews and the Greeks opened the sense of sociality up to
infinity.

The Mosaic Commandments have, in the perspective of conflict between angel
and ape, a new look. Traditional thought, I believe, would have it that
Moses imposed on an unwilling people a set of virtues that would quell
their unruliness and, as some suppose, make them governable. Instead, I
suggest, he provided a justification for the cortical goals that they felt
but could not so well express. Like other charismatic leaders, he told
them that they must do what they wanted to do but could not justify doing.
If one drools for a thing, the Id impulse is to take it; but the cortical
goal of justice is not met by stealing. The ancient Hebrews had no more
awareness of cortical goals than does the modern sociobiologist. Moses
says, "Thou shalt not steal," attributing the commandment to
a powerful God, and thus warrants the self-restriction. Mosaic religion
aids personality integration by setting limits. The impulse to sex is confined
to marriage, the impulse to violence is confined to enemies of the nation,
and so on. Eventually, the prophet says that "Thou shalt love . .
. thy neighbor as thyself (Leviticus 19:18) and Jesus enunciates
the Golden Rule. Early Judaism seems to be a religion of justice, developing
over a millennium toward a Christianity of love. Both suggest a capacity
to focalize cortical activity beyond the capacity of Rank I. The justice
of Judaism is connected, appropriately as I see it, with a recognition
of work To work with expectation of a just reward is satisfying, and that
was the outcome promised. To work without expectation of reward is also
satisfying; love is satisfied by the welfare of the loved one. The Judeo-Christian
system is oriented to the life of the individual in society.

Among the cortical goals, love and justice stand in opposite quadrants,
love in the right front and justice in the left rear. (The arguments to
support this speculation are not clear enough to publish [Endnote 14].)
That a culture struggling to sort out its cortical functions would discover
one goal and proceed to the one diametrically opposed seems to me plausible.

In Greece, during this period, two inventions occurred. One, as Gombrich
puts it, was mimesis. The mimetic maker separated reality from fiction
as none had done before. Furthermore, the Greeks began to pose their statues
in action, to put expressions on faces. These are great novelties, and
suggest to me--but not to Gombrich, who rejects any thought of evolution
--that the Greeks were achieving new capacities for analysis of perception
as well as new manual skill. The other Greek invention was philosophy.
It was not science; certainly no Greek had a modern conception of the relationship
between theory and observation. Plato took reality to be as hard to perceive
as Christian Heaven; his theoretical domain was more real to him than the
world perceived. If we today might say that the domain of ideals is to
the world around us as fiction is to reality, he made the analogy the other
way around.

The significant aspect of Greek philosophy, however, is that they thought
of doing it. They thought of using verbal argument to deal with problems
of nature and of conduct. They formulated a concept of The Good--many concepts,
I suppose. But with their concentration on truth and beauty, the Greeks
show an orientation to nature rather than to society.

Greek culture emerged with a continuing debate between poet and philosopher.
The cortical goal of truth belongs to the left front quadrant, beauty to
the right rear. Like the Hebrews, the Greeks fixed their attention on a
pair of diametric opposites.

The Hebrews with their new religion, and the Greeks with their distinction
between reality and fiction, seem to me to be sharpening the capacities
of a kind of cortex that exists in each quadrant, or corner, of the cortex.
As tissue, it is called "tertiary"; as component of a cognitive
system, its function is "gnomonic". In Cognitive Structures
(1981) I proposed a superordinate level; subsequent unpublished work led
me to a more specific proposal: Cognition occurs on three levels, gnomonic,
episodic, and systemic. Only on the episodic level is cognitive material
marked with respect to time and place. The systemic level might be likened
to dictionary or thesaurus. The highest, timeless level, gnomonic, contains
the axioms of the whole system. Beauty, truth, love, and Justice are gnomonic
goals. The sense of infinity and eternity, which may have arisen among
the Greeks and is with us still, shows a vague consciousness of the gnomonic,
as the sense of horror shows a vague consciousness of the reptilian. Neither
gnomonic nor reptilian is accessible to awareness, but we do succeed in
giving verbal formulation to their contents by metaphors arising in introspection
or meditation. Psychoanalysis looks more to the reptilian; mysticism looks
more to the gnomonic.

In Rank 1, the contents of the gnomonic level is revealed in proverbs.
Rank 2 educates the gnomonic level, and indicates its content in the verbalizations
of philosophy and theology.

The expressive culture of Rank 2 in India takes other routes.

More in harmony with the passive other-worldliness of the Indian masses
are physical activities that are private and demand extreme self-discipline.
Some peculiar Indian physical activities are intended to help the individual
to subjugate the external aspects of existence to the spiritual and timeless.
Some yoga exercises such as the lotus position or standing on the head
may appear to westerners as if intended to be showy, but the object of
these and more spectacular exercises is to transcend the body by conquering
its everyday limitations. Similarly, certain ancient Indian breathing exercises
have as their purpose to deprive the brain temporarily of oxygen and so
to induce visions of a universe apart from and superior to the ordinary
world of the flesh. However fetchingly sensual classical Indian dance may
appear to the western observer, its practitioners are not celebrants of
sweaty physical effort, but communicators in refined symbolic language
of traditional myths. It might be observed here that many esthetes of our
own time analogously misobserve sun-illuminated medieval European stained
glass windows. Most traditional Indian dances, like the windows at Chartres,
are intended to be more vividly instructive by obliterating with beauty
the spectators' mundane critical intelligence [Mandell, 1984, p. 90].

The gnomonic is recognizable in "the spiritual and timeless."
The use of oxygen deprivation is a reminder that the brain is a biological
entity; its operation can be influenced by perceptions, actions, and chemical
intrusions. The tension between ape and angel is everywhere apparent in
the paragraph quoted above. And the obliteration of "critical intelligence"
by beauty is close to my thesis.

Another manifestation of gnomonic content is the making of things which
cannot be consumed to satisfy a physiological need, or used in the process
of providing consumables. Although the word "art" is ordinarily
used to cover all of what I intend here, the painting and sculpture of
Europe from the Renaissance through the middle of the twentieth century
has unique characteristics that warrant giving it a name of its own, and
none is better than "art." For the moment, let us call the desirable
but economically useless things of Rank 1 "pre-art," and those
of Rank 2 "proto-art."

In the sixth century B.C. in Greece, there were the Dionysian dances:

In many towns of Greece, every alternate year, Bacchanalian assemblies
of women gather together and it is the custom for maidens to carry the
thyrsus [which bore a phallic symbol] and to revel together, honouring
and glorifying the god; and for married women to worship the god in organized
bands and to revel in every way to celebrate the presence of Dionysus,
imitating the Maenads who of old, it is said, constantly attended the god
[Diodorus, 1st century B.C., quoted by Bland, 1976, p. 23].

One can feel the magic here, as in England before its Renaissance. Pisistratus,
who ruled Athens from 560 B.C. to about 527 B.C., constructed City Dionysia
in 534 B.C. (Aylen 1985). During this time, Thespis inserted prologues
and interludes into dance drama. A single person spoke the text.

In the fifth century B.C., the Greek drama reached a higher level than
this; Aeschylus obtained the services of a second actor, and Sophocles
of a third. Their plays were partly danced: "the center of the mystery
that is the Athenian theater lies in the dance" (Aylen, 1985, p. 19).
Drama was not without its magic, not sharply differentiated from religion:
"the Athenian theater of the fifth century . . . was a totality of
experience, in which religion, poetry, and theatricality were inseparable:
every play was an act of moral and political commitment; every play was
an act of worship, and it was through this that every aspect of theater
was held in balance with all the others" (Aylen, 1985, p. 20). Attendance
was obligatory, and participation a duty. Drama emerged slowly from rituals
of dance and chant [Endnote 15].

Nor did Christianity begin as an austere rite. Bucknell writes that early
bishops led the dance in the church choir (p. 31), and that St. Augustine,
in the fourth century A.D., noted the dance of Jesus, still a sacred rite
of initiation (p. 191). Today's Holy Rollers may be our best illustration
of what it was like to be a Christian in the early centuries.

As the Greeks elaborated the content of the gnomonic level, and in that
way made it possible to control more precisely the content of episodic
and systemic levels--in common parlance, became rational--they created
a new situation. Among them, some acquired the culture of Rank 2; the majority,
of course, did not. Ceremonies, spectacles, and every part of expressive
culture had to be, for the majority, essentially no more complex than in
Rank 1. Insofar as persons bearing the new Rank 2 culture took part in
the preparation of events or objects for the majority, the content might
be different from anything in a Rank 1 society--but not essentially more
sophisticated. The most plausible speculation I can find is that the dances
and drama of the majority in Rank 2 continued to seek the magic as before.

But the texts prepared by Rank 2 writers for Rank 2 readers included, as
I see it, some that eschewed the magic. Instead these texts sought to transmit,
to inculcate, to fix in the minds of readers the new system of thought
of Rank 2. And among these texts with "higher" purposes, some
were didactic but some were proto-art, written for emotional effect. With
Rank 2 processes of cognition, one could control impulse more effectively.
Did the poet know that? Certainly not. Did the poet feel that? Quite possibly.
The processes in the reader, or in the spectator at the most advanced drama,
might consist of the pity, terror, and catharsis that Aristotle identified.
The construction of Rank 2 literature is simpler than that of Rank 3; and
the reactions of the reader or auditor are simpler. Let us put it that
verbal proto-art induces a mode, or a sequence of modes, or a modal conflict;
and resolves what it has aroused. By metaphorical interpretation, the audience
can arrive at a better conceptual grasp of emotional life, and in fantasy
execute modal action patterns that are prohibited in Rank 2 life. Catharsis
is a powerful experience, but it is not the magic.

Rank 2 is tainted with perversion. Religion is intolerant; tortures, at
their zenith in the Spanish Inquisition (late in time, but still Rank 2);
religious warfare between Christians and Muslims or between Protestants
and Catholics (among many opposed pairs); Puritanical repression of communities
by unbending elders; restrictions on abortion, on contraception, and on
the distribution of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS (for the thinking
of Rank 2 remains powerful in the world today); and forced conversion of
pagans, with no concern whatsoever for side effects (as disgust with nudity
led missionaries to stop Polynesians from daily bathing, and increased
the spread of disease). Celibacy itself must be counted as a perversion.
The treatment of children, under the doctrine of original sin (and other
doctrines, for that matter), was never tender and understanding. The perversion
is not specific to religion; witness the spectacles of Rome (Twitchell,
1989).

When Rank 2 thinkers acquire political power in the modern world, we call
them authoritarian The ordinary person with Rank 2 character is dependent,
psychically, on the great leader. The Rank 2 leader, in turn, regards the
ordinary person as incapable of thought, of analysis and planning, of reaching
valid decisions. Overtly, the requirement is strict obedience. Within the
cognitive and emotional system of the individual, the effect is constriction
of possibilities. Personality must be integrated within the limits of whatever
is locally permissible.

Since religion is intrinsically a phenomenon of Rank 2, it follows that
religions are authoritarian and constrictive of personality. The character
of a Rank 2 religious person is stronger than that of a Rank 1 person;
the constriction is not so strict in Rank 2. Nor is the perversion of Rank
2 so broad and deep as in Rank 1. In Athens, it is said, one could move
about freely without a weapon. Trust extended further; commerce spread
and grew in volume.

The achievement of Rank 2 was to bring knowledge of the whole world, of
utterly different cultures, together in one place. That place was Europe,
and the time was the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. China had locked
itself up; India had never gotten itself together; and the Mediterranean
basin had failed to hold itself together in the face of invasions and disasters.
When Europe came out of the Dark Ages (which were Dark in Europe in spite
of what has been written in their defense), it rose from Rank 1 through
Rank 2 to Rank 3 in a few hundred years.

Freedom and dignity, in their modern acceptance, were not understood before
the French Enlightenment and the American Revolution which--through a transatlantic
correspondence, arrived at a program of governance for Rank 3. In the fourteenth
century, Florence discovered the goodness of life on Earth, and without
surrendering the hope of heaven began to value the foretaste that could
be had here and now [Endnote 16]. Artists there and then learned to see
in a new way, and began the construction of illusionist painting (Gombrich).
In the sixteenth century, observation and mathematics coalesced in science.
But it was not until the eighteenth century that psychopolitical advances
fixed a new way of life.

To live as a thinking person in an incomprehensible world is a parlous
condition. Until science began to formulate its general explanations, that
parlous condition was the condition of our species. Simple knowledge makes
an emotional difference. But the change between Rank 2 and Rank 3 goes
deeper than simple knowing; after all, if knowledge were required for emotional
stability, few of us would be better off than our remote ancestors. We
do not know, most of us, very much of physical, chemical, or biological
theory. What we know is that others do know. The world is neither animate
like ourselves, every plant and stone inhabited by a spirit that must be
propitiated before we can eat a vegetable or build a wall, nor the immediate
manifestation of God's will, susceptible of miraculous and hence unpredictable
alteration at God's whim. The world, science teaches us, is consistent,
coherent, and stable. Nature may make leaps, according to the latest theories,
but the strong belief that nature did not make leaps gave our ancestors
for three hundred years the courage to extend themselves in many dimensions.

Arithmetic, as we infer from brain scans, is a cortical mode. Before the
decimal system and its algorithms for addition and the rest came to Europe,
from the Arabs through Florence, after 1200, there was no such mode in
the West. A new cortical mode involves the cooperative activation of patches
of tissue that have not worked together before. Perhaps the modes that
go with reading and with arithmetic can be imitated; those who learn to
read may have not just the one mode of reading but a whole family of modes
analogous to the reading mode; and those who learn arithmetic may acquire
the capacity for learning of another family of modes. This speculation
reaches far beyond any data known to me, but there are by now many studies
of the differences between literate and nonliterate persons, cultures,
and eras.

The difference in the West between Rank 2 and Rank 3 is far greater than
the difference between Rank 1 and Rank 2. With Rank 3 there come periods
of peace, but also periods of intense warfare (about which I have something
to say, below). Industry is born. Disease is partially controlled, by sanitation
and medicine. Famine is reduced Length of life increases; the middle years,
from ten to sixty, are freed from the fear of immediate death. Nations
form, and organize education; over the centuries, the percentage of the
population educated to any level increases. The treatment of children improves;
awareness that children are different from adults, and that their needs
are different, appears and diffuses. Individuals come to think of themselves
as persons, with decreasing regard to their positions in families. The
possibility of improving one's life by taking effort arises and is recognized

The leaders of Rank 3 government and other organizations exhibit a capacity
for planning and adherence to long-term goals that Rank 2 lacked. Some
of them recognized that their positions were justified by their contributions
to the general welfare, not their own private gain and not the welfare
of their caste.

Early in its reawakening, Europe brought together the very different worldviews
of Judeo-Christian and Greek philosophies. The effect of overlaying the
systems of love-justice and truth-beauty was to realize the modern four-quadrant
scheme of cortical goals. Crossing left-front-right-rear with right-front-left-rear
could reasonably be expected to produce that result. Science (truth), political
economy (justice), religion (love), and art (beauty) are institutions devoted
to these goals.

The achievement of Rank 3 was to improve the material welfare of large
populations, and to make the world's knowledge available to everyone on
Earth, in principle if not in fact. But these achievements are incomplete;
the population of the Earth at the end of the twentieth century is distributed,
according to processes of cognition, among the three ranks, and the distribution
varies from country to country. Welfare, freedom, and cognitive level vary
together [Endnote 17].

Accordingly, performances and objects made to give pleasure are offered
today in three distinct categories which I shall call art, entertainment,
and diversion.

Art began with the Renaissance. Craftsman and artist came then to be distinct
roles, and secular purposes obtained toleration. The manner of art was
representational; when the alternatives of abstraction and expressionism
were invented in the twentieth century, art gave birth to its successor,
and more or less died. There remains an audience for art, the ones who
visit the Metropolitan Museum, the ones who buy recordings of Beethoven's
symphonies. The proper recipient of art is one capable of self-reorganization
(Powers 1973, pp. 179-189); for such a person, art yields epiphany. A work
of art is made to be coherent, but its coherence must not be too easily
accessible if it is to have its proper effect. The recipient must expend
the necessary effort, perhaps with considerable discomfort, in order to
be rewarded with realization of the work's coherence and, in the same moment,
of the coherence of the self. For a moment the ape and the angel fit together
as smoothly as yin and yang For such moments do artists and their audience
tolerate the pains and risks of creation and re-creation.

Entertainment has lower goals. Talented persons with Rank 3 cognitive capacity
have invented genres accessible to Rank 2 recipients, genres quite different
from those of Rank 2 cultures. Certain actors, comedians, dancers, cabaret
singers, and such deserve to be called entertainers. Because the Rank 2
personality is not capable of reorganization--except perhaps with psychoanalysis--the
goal has to be maintenance of the defense systems. The pressure of the
ape, the reptilian brain, is unremitting. To satisfy the angel, Rank 2
builds defenses; and the person living in a Rank 3 culture builds defenses
that were not available earlier. But the defenses tend to crumble under
pressure, and require steady rebuilding. A good play, a lovely song, a
film of the right sort can help. Examples are Frank Sinatra, Oklahoma!,
Jack Benny, Gone with the Wind, and the spy novels of John Le Carre.
The motion picture industry, from about 1930 to the late 1940s, was primarily
devoted to entertainment [Endnote 18]. Indeed, the motion picture industry--Hollywood--in
the 1920s may be the original source of entertainment; and if it is, then
Charles Chaplin must be recognized as its Edison. For the right audience,
the end of entertainment is satisfaction.

Diversion is lower again. Diversions are made with such simple and obvious
coherence that anyone can understand without much effort, even adolescents.
The goal of diversion is to convince the recipient that defense is not
necessary, according to one of several (false) principles. The free release
of impulse is a glorious way to live, according to one principle. Rambo
and his aggressive, violent ilk never block the impulse to kill or maim.
Sexuality, in another genre, is unrestricted by thought of love. A second
principle avers that there is no ape; or, shall we say, some are angels
and some are apes, and the audience is composed of angels. The impulses
that the audience senses and considers evil are projected onto a Blob
or a mass murderer, criminal, spy, wrestler, or other antagonist. The protagonist
may kill, but reluctantly in these genres. What set Le Carre apart from
the standard spy writer was his admission of negative qualities in Britain;
his predecessors had projected all evil onto the other side. A third principle
promises easy resolution of internal problems for those who follow social
dictates: "and they lived happily ever after," once they resolved
a trivial misunderstanding and married. Yet another principle sentimentally
accepts the impossibility of happiness and success. The tragedies of soap
opera lead neither to Aristotelian catharsis nor to Shakespearean epiphany,
but merely to the recognition of another hopeless entanglement. Here is
the realm of Schadenfreude, of "there but for the grace of God."

The person who is brought to ecstasy by a work of art wants nothing more
for a while. The person who gets satisfaction from an entertainment does
not ask for another immediately. But the television set, an endless source
of diversion, is never turned off. One diversion leads only to another.
The internal state of the recipient is little improved, only palliated.

Short of perfect integration, each of us will need diversion occasionally,
and entertainment frequently. The person who seeks only diversion loses
art's opportunity for growth. We are not born with Rank 3 processes of
cognition. Children need simple materials, but materials that prepare them
for reorganization in a Rank 2 pattern. Adolescents need materials of an
intermediate kind, but materials that prepare them for reorganization in
a Rank 3 pattern. Diversions do not serve.

To solve an urgent problem in such a way as to create vastly larger problems
in the long run is perverse in any culture, period, or cognitive rank.
In particular, evil is perverse.

The question of evil has never been answered in a way that I can accept.
Perhaps we can do better by considering evil a malfunction specific to
complex systems, or to our own complex system with its specific components.
With complexity always comes the risk of breakdown, as every automobilist
knows. And evolution always delivers its surprise packages without operating
instructions. The other mammals learn to operate their systems by "playing"
while young (not in the sense that play is a cortical mode in our species,
of course) [Endnote 19]. We inherited that way of learning, but it does
not suffice. We invented formal schooling, and Sunday schools, to augment
what came in the genetic package, but we are still developing the curriculum.
We are probably still misusing ourselves, with the same kind of result
that an overbold and undertrained driver gets from an automobile. Anxiety,
says MacLean, "may be categorized as the unpleasant general affect
that accompanies alerting for, and anticipation of, potentially harmful
future events" (1990, p. 531). It seems to me that we anticipate harmful
outcomes just when we are not prepared to cope with them. A person breaks
down in the face of threat beyond his or her competence.

Our breakdowns tend to certain forms because we contain the aggressive
and defensive mechanisms that our ancestors needed, back to the remote
past, to avoid extinction. We have the capacity to dominate groups of our
own kind, to drive away strangers of our own kind who intrude on our territory,
to kill predators and prey (to avoid being eaten, while ourselves eating).
Activated on their natural occasions, these are not evil tendencies. But
the resident of a modern city only rarely has to defend his apartment against
an intruder; leadership of working groups is today best determined by knowledge
and skill, not by biological dominance. The capacities remain, and are
seen most often on unnatural occasions.

Another peculiarity of our species can be found in the mechanisms of language
and, more generally, of social interaction. Feedback is necessary in the
management of complex processes. To speak, one needs a model of the hearer
that can interpret what one says and feed the result back for verification
To listen with understanding, one needs a model of the speaker, against
which to test one's own interpretation of what is being said. These models
are fluid; they change during conversation, becoming, more accurate over
time. But they are subject to pathology; when infected with one's own negative
qualities, they begin to appear evil. Thus projection is part of being
human; when we are paranoid, projection protects us against negative self-evaluation
while giving the world a negative tone.

Now suppose that someone projects strong negative qualities on another
person; the natural action, then, must be to attack that person, verbally
or even physically. To others, the attack seems unjustified and perhaps
cruel, even evil. Only the attacker senses the negative qualities that
justify defense or punishment. All concerned in such an episode have the
same set of cortical goals: beauty, truth, love, and justice. The attacker
may reconcile his or her behavior with those goals, or may be uncomfortable
but nevertheless compelled to act. The one who is attacked will try to
reconcile the pain with those goals, assuming as always that others share
them; the victim may well come to feel guilty of some violation that would
justify the attack. The onlooker may deem the attacker evil, or accept
the negative evaluation of the victim and derive from the episode some
of the benefits that the attacker gets.

Hold the nose of any air-breathing animal, human or other, and the animal
will begin to struggle. The mechanisms that routinely obtain sustenance,
security, sociality, and sex are backed up by others that emit more and
more vigorous behavior when needs are thwarted. What happens in a human
being in one of the many thwarting situations that cultures create? We
are able to aim our vigorous behaviors in many directions; but sometimes
we become cruel to ourselves or to others.

Some of the cultures that have appeared on Earth have been systematically
cruel; indeed, a great many have been--that is to say, they have raised
their children to carry out cruel practices routinely, and to consider
those practices right and respectable. In the twentieth century, several
powerful nations have adopted cruel cultures. Nazi Germany is most infamous.
The Nazi who practiced cruelty, not spontaneously but as a craft to which
he was assigned by the state, may have been no sadist. If there were persons
who conducted torture in work mode and not by reptilian impulse, then they
did indeed make evil banal (this may be Hannah Arendt's meaning, but examination
of her book leaves me uncertain [Endnote 20]).

Cruelty, some sexual variations, eating to excess or not eating, and a
good many other practices deserve to be called perversions because they
solve problems in the small at the cost of severe damage in the large.
If all sapients are created equal, the rights of victims count for as much
as the rights of attackers. The attacker's psychic economy may run smoothly
at the expense of the victim's welfare; or the attacker may destroy him/herself
in the long run while coping temporarily. The world has vast experience
with perversions, experience which many still disregard. Self-deception
is still as easy as ever, it seems.

The phenomenon of warfare occupies such a prominent segment of human history,
both in the living and in the retelling, that it is ordinarily assumed
to be natural and appropriate. National boundaries today were fixed by
warfare in the past; political leaders have very often achieved prominence
first in warfare, and many have used military force to take and hold political
power. Whole populations have chosen warfare as the necessary means to
their most highly valued ends. The occasions, purposes, methods, scope,
and frequency of warfare have changed with cultural evolution (Wright 1942,
Otterbein 1970); the more modern warmakers have been more rational than
the earlier were. But one may ask whether war was ever the rationally advantageous
choice for a polity, whether the aggressor or the defender. The collapse
of the Muscovite empire (the Soviet Union and its client states) reminds
us that dictatorial conquerors are incapable of creating thousand-year
empires. The acceptance of defeat without combat would have led to a better
outcome than was achieved in many wars if not in all; costs would have
been incurred, but only temporarily.

Why, then, do sapients choose combat? My answer to this question, that
they do so perversely, casts aspersions on the whole pantheon of national
heroes. I recognize adventure as a mode that culminates in the experience
of beauty, but I do not see mortal combat as the only activity suitable
to this mode; art is an adventure, along with exploration of Earth and
space, training wild animals, mountaineering, and so on. The characteristic
of warfare is not that one puts one's life at risk, but that one threatens
to kill fellow sentients. To recognize a President's willingness to kill
as being of the same kind as an armed robber's seems to me intellectually
more honest than any argument that purports to distinguish the two.

The great ones of the present and the past cannot be revered, although
some of them can be admired. Although I judge that their wars and other
reprehensible actions were perverse, I am not so sure that they could have
been avoided. The world we live in was obtained at a horrible cost, but
the cost was paid. Most of our ancestors did the best they knew how. We
can only do the same, applying our best efforts to the discovery of our
own perversions.

In warfare the killer and the killed belong to different polities; only
the members of one's own polity have been admitted as fully human. The
range of admission has widened from rank to rank, and it may be that Rank
4 will admit the common humanity of all sapients. While I do not expect
my arguments to change the course of events, I do predict that a Rank 4
culture, if it comes into full existence, will reject warfare more firmly
than any before.

The preceding section makes obvious that many perversions conceal themselves
behind the rubrics of politics, art, business, and romance. An object or
event presented as art should be coherent, even if its coherence is obscure
to any but the initiated. Its coherence should tend to elicit a sense of
the coherence of the self in recipients, if only in the healthy initiated
recipients. An object or event that broadcasts incoherence is a manifestation
of perversion; it is not art. A theater of the absurd is, on its face,
itself absurd, although it may be that the facade is meant to confuse only
the uninitiated. The sense of coherence and meaningfulness is not paralleled
by some sense of incoherence and meaninglessness. The first promotes health
and effectiveness, fulfillment and inner well being; the latter promotes
breakdown, not integration of a higher order [Endnote 21].

Yet the twentieth century has been a time of transition, and transitions
are not easy. Three ranks of cognitive capacity and cultural evolution
are complete; a fourth rank may be taking shape. If not, then a time of
darkness is likely to come next. In times of transition, children are not
raised in a way that makes adult integration on the new level as easy as
it will later become. They come to maturity with a congeries of incompatible
materials in their heads, and no generally accepted cultural pattern to
adopt. With luck, some make it; at first, perhaps, only in narrow technical
domains, but later larger and larger fractions of the population arrive
at the new way of understanding the whole of life. The most fortunate among
us may just now be achieving such integrity.

In this context, let me turn once more to ballet. Around the beginning
of the century, thinking about time began to change. Motion pictures were
conceived and made real. Time-and-motion studies began, and used photographs
exposed long enough to record the path of a small light during the course
of a complete action. Painters began to try to capture temporal phases
in a single canvas. Just at this time, Balanchine began to study ballet.
His perception and conception of movement was perhaps in the new vein,
different from his predecessors'.

On this interpretation, Balanchine's "art" is quintessentially
of the twentieth century. But is it art? We still use the word "science"
to identify the study of nature with instruments and mathematics, but serious
work in our time is deeply different from the science that prevailed from
the time of Copernicus, say, to 1895. Has art, which belongs to Rank 3,
been superseded? Did structure, goals, and audience change when the representational
manner gave place to impression and abstraction? When harmony gave place
to the atonal?

Balanchine's pieces are variously called abstract, pure, or plotless. They
are certainly not emotionless, although some pieces seem to present no
emotion other than reverence (or awe)--the emotion that Denby could give
no name to. If they are of a new kind, not art but something unnamed as
yet, then it is all the more remarkable that little children watch them
in fascination. As a new rank forms, early work is often cold; to achieve
a result of a new kind, the worker gives up what was commonplace in the
old kind. Older ballet told stories; Balanchine does not exactly tell stories,
but he sometimes suggests them. In Scotch Symphony, the leading
ballerina wears a tutu and all the other dancers wear kilts. Man and woman
dance together and are separated by a group of men. Without narration or
mime, a generic plot comes across.

With better trained dancers, Balanchine could make tighter sequences, and
he knew how to form sequences effectively. He could make new combinations
of movements over the parts of a dancer's body, and across the whole company.
He used these new capacities to arouse more powerfully the modal action
patterns of the audience; and once the audience acquired the skill of watching,
and the courage to be so moved, he obtained the response and the recognition
that he had earned--but development of an audience began in the 1920s and
did not cross a threshold until 1947.

And so we continue. Perversity, incoherence, and constriction cover most
of the world. The minority that can free itself, maintain dignity, and
find fulfillment in work, play, adventure, and love is still small but
seems to be growing The creative, productive, and organizational powers
of those whose emotions are under control but not repressed is great enough
to give them the future. Unless the barbarians once more overrun civilization,
the world is moving toward a new stage [Endnote 22].

1. "There are scarcely any dance steps... Instead, we see dancing
used as an extension of a dramatic situation: steps are repeated over and
over or protracted into poses or connected not by other steps but by walks,
runs, hesitant gestures, glances. ... [Like] a series of short, probing
conversations. ... the dancers begin to develop the psychological dimensions
of real characters." Croce (1980), p. 66.

2. "The Ford Foundation has declared by the bestowal of nearly $6
million that the dance technique and style preferred by George Balanchine
are so superior to any others existing in this country that they should
be developed to the virtual exclusion of all others." Allen Hughes
was patently irritated, but his remark was, at the time almost literally
correct (New York Times , Dec. 12, 1963, quoted by Dunning, 1985,
p. 108)

3. This assertion was heard by Janet A. Hays about 1975 in a talk given
by the Joffrey Ballet. I have not found a published source.

4. "Grace a'heritage de Fokine qui decorseta la danse classique, il
a su introduire une souplesse dans les lignes, une fantaisie dans les pas
et une invention perpetuelle dans les enchainements,tout en maintenant
l'extreme rigueur et l'absolue cIarte de l'inspiration." I translate:
"Thanks to the heritage of Fokine, who uncorseted the classical dance,
he knew how to introduce a suppleness in the lines, a fantasy in the steps
and a perpetual invention in the sequences, all the while maintaining extreme
rigor and absolute clarity of inspiration" (Babilée 1952, p.
2). Isadora Duncan is also sometimes given credit for inspiring more sinuous
dance.

5. Bournonville, in Copenhagen about 1870, developed technique and style
requiring intricate footwork in a rapid tempo, but was not imported elsewhere
well into the twentieth century (Bruhn & Moore, 1961). Whatever Balanchine
learned in Leningrad from the work of Petipa and Fokine, he found in western
Europe a barren situation. Berthe Bernay, dancer in the Paris Opera, wrote
in 1890: "J'ai souvent remarque que, meme a la ville, le danseur s'observait
davantage que Ia danseuse. II marche en scene incontestablement mieux que
cette derniere. Cela tient-il au costume qui, decouvrant Ies formes de
l'homme plus que celles de la femme, l'oblige a prendre plus particulierement
soin de ses mouvements? C'est possible" (pp. 176-177). I translate:
"I have often noticed that, even in the street, the male dancer presents
himself better than the female. He walks on stage incontestably better
than she. Does that follow from costume which, uncovering the form of the
man more than that of the woman, obliges him to take special care of his
movements? It's possible." Dancers who cannot walk beautifully!

Serge Lifar (1954), speaking of 1909 when Diaghilev opened his Ballets
Russes in Paris, says "Such was the state of affairs that it would
almost have been possible for a choreographer to produce a ballet... by
telephone!" [Three periods in original.] The choreographer could only
list the steps. And Boulos (1939), deploring the situation in that year,
wrote, "For each time a variation is not composed of the traditional
sequence glissade - cabriole - assemblé- -
entrechat - six - préparation - pirouettes
- they shout 'heresy'" (p. 265). Dancers embellished the choreography
with their leaps and twirls: "Moreover, these steps added by the dancers
are generally those most applauded by the public because they are those
which best display the qualities of the executant" (p. 266); Boulos
does not deplore these insertions.

6. That there is a magic in the dance is a familiar conceit; the word appears
in texts and at least one book title. As far as I know, no explication
has been offered in a framework comparable to the one that I employ.

7. "In terms of Freudian psychology, I suggested that 'the visceral
brain is not at all unconscious (possibly not even in certain stages of
sleep), but rather eludes the grasp of the intellect because its animistic
and primitive structure makes it impossible to communicate in verbal terms'"
(MacLean 1990, p. 266, quoting his 1949, p. 348. MacLean emphasizes his
debt to Papez, 1937, for the original formulation of a "visceral brain"
as the mechanism of emotion.)

8. Martin & Bateson (1986, pp. 39~0), explain: "(Highly stereotyped,
species-characteristic behavior patterns were referred to by early ethologists
as 'fixed action patterns.' However, the term 'modal action pattern,' or
just 'action pattern,' is now preferred since even these types of behavior
pattern do show some variability: see Barlow, 1977; Bekoff, 1977; Dawkins,
1983.)"

Hess (1973, p. 29) says that "The ethologists have restricted the
term instinctive to the so-called fixed-action patterns of the kind
discovered as taxonomic characters by Whitman and by Heinroth and exemplified
by the straight movement of the greylag goose's bill toward the nest".
The goose never uses feet or wings to move a lost egg back into the nest,
but only its bill. Whitman (1899) and Heinroth (1910) antedate Lorenz (1935,1937).

Lea (1984, pp. 21-23) lists characteristics of action patterns; his captions
are stereotypy, universality, independence of individual experience, ballisticness
(no midcourse control), singleness of purpose, and "The existence
of known trigger stimuli". I am by no means prepared to argue that
the expression of emotion in human beings has all of these characteristics.

Lieberman (1991, p. 22) writes that "Many of the gestures and postures
that higher primates such as squirrel monkeys use for communication are
still controlled by the basal ganglia; these displays are analogous to
displays that lizards use to challenge competitors. ... The basal ganglia
also appear to be implicated in many of the nonvocal displays that signal
or accompany emotion..." The basal ganglia belong to the reptilian
brain; MacLean writes of it as "integrating the somatic and autonomic
displays used in prosematic, social communication" (1990, p. 567).

9. The modes now confined to bedroom and bathroom were removed from public
view in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See Elias (1978,
1982), which I cite from Zuboff (1988), pp. 26-30.

In the United States in the l940s, "[Elton] Mayo [an industrial psychologist]
expected those in administrative positions to be able to free themselves
from emotional involvement... The implication was that managers could understand
workers' nonlogic (or psycho-logic) in a way that workers themselves could
not" (Zuboff 1988, p. 234; she cites Mayo, 1945, and commentary by
Bendix 1974.) I detect an awareness of the difference between Rank-2 cognition
(the workers) and Rank-3 cognition (the managers), although 1 might not
agree with Mayo's inferences and conclusions.

11. "Vocalizations, by contrast, may have served a primarily emotional
role..." (Corballis, p. 164). I have recently made the same proposal
(Hays 1991, Sec. 4.1). The first mammalian vocalization, according to MacLean
(1990, p. 397), was the infant's separation cry.

13. Gombrich's Chapter III, pp. 93-115, is called "Pygmalion's Power".
Chapter IV begins: "If I had to reduce the last chapter to a brief
formula it would be 'making comes before matching' Before the artist ever
wanted to match the sights of the visible world he wanted to create things
in their own right" (p. 116).

14. Although the argument for assigning particular goals to particular
quadrants is still beyond me, the reader may be comforted by a few remarks
about known properties of cortex

The left-right differences are widely discussed at present. The left is
more effective with digital, logical operations; language is largely supported
there. The right is more effective with physiognomic, figural operations;
facial recognition and spatial orientation are supported there.

Front-back differences have been known for longer. The front is the motor
region, and supports planning of complex operations. The rear is the perceptual
region. In language, Roman Jakobson said that the front is syntagmatic
(grammar), the rear paradigmatic (thesaurus).

In Homo Ludens , Huizinga describes as play many activities that
I classify
as adventure.

15. The origin of drama, and especially of tragedy, in the Dionysian dance
rituals was suggested by Aristotle, expanded by Nietzsche, given some technical
support by Murray (1913), and worked out in detail by Pickard-Cambridge
(1927). This sequence is stated clearly by Else (1967), who believes that
its content is not correct. He states his "assumptions-he [the reader]
may call them biases if he prefers" on p. 7:

1) Whatever may have happened elsewhere, in Polynesia Peloponnese, it is
Athens alone that counts.

2) The origin of tragedy was not so much a gradual,"organic"
development as a sequence of two creative leaps, by Thespis and Aeschylus,
with certain conditioning factors precedent to each.

3) Although the two leaps were separated from each other by a considerable
space of time, the second followed in direct line from the first. There
is no room between them for a reversal of the spirit of tragedy from gay
to solemn.

4) There is no solid evidence for tragedy ever having been Dionysiac in
any sense except that it was originally and regularly presented at the
City Dionysia in Athens.

5) There is no reason to believe that tragedy grew out of any kind of possession
or ecstasy (Ergrffenheit ), Dionysiac or otherwise.

Lacking the expertise to assess Else's argument, I can only note that he
seems to be in the minority, and remark that gaiety is not necessarily
the Dionysiac emotion, nor "magic", as I intend it here, quite
the same as possession or ecstasy. 1 hope that I can allow "creative
leaps" by Thespis and Aeschylus, and cognitive invention by every
playwright beginning with them, without rejecting all continuity from Dionysian
rites to tragedy. Murray (1927, quoted by Else, p. 108), wrote that "In
plays like Hamlet or the Agamemnon or the Electra
... we have also, I suspect, a strange unanalyzed vibration below the surface,
an undercurrent of desires and fears and passions, long slumbering yet
eternally familiar, which have for thousands of years lain near the root
of our most intimate emotions..." For me, this argues continuity;
but Else comments that "This, and not a ritual form, is what the Greek
tragedian (no doubt unconsciously) presupposed and worked with."

16. "Florence in the Quattrocento: . . . western capitalism
in the long run created a new art of living, new ways of thinking: it developed
side by side with them." Florence was "precocious and abnormal"
(Braudel 1982, p. 578). "Leon Battista Albetu... wrote the first three
Libri della Famiglia in Rome, in about 1433-1434; the fourth was
completed in Florence in 1441. [Werner] Sombart [an economic historian]
finds in these books a new climate: praise of money, recognition of the
value of time, the need to live thriftily-all good bourgeois principles
in the first flush of their youth" (Braudel 1982, p. 579).

17. Very few persons achieve a uniform level of maturity in professional
skills, personal relations, and emotional strength The typical educated
person has components at each of the ranks available in his or her environment.
The distribution of cognitive rank across the population of a country can
be estimated from the distribution of educational levels there.

18. A good example of motion picture as entertainment is Duel in the
Sun , released in 1946. The producer was David O. Selznick, the director
King Vidor; the central action occurs among characters played by Jennifer
Jones, Joseph Cotten, and Gregory Peck. The girl is described as a half-breed,
with an Anglo father and a Mexican (Indian) mother. The men are sons of
a wealthy and powerful Texas cattleman. Coming into the household, the
girl attracts both men. (As a half-breed, she can be a mixture of angel
and ape.) The younger (Cotten) is educated, restrained, and gentle; he
becomes engaged to a similar young woman and offers brotherly protection
to the half-breed. The older brother (Peck) is said to be spoiled. He seduces
the half-breed girl, kills a man who would marry her, and shoots to kill
his brother. Recognizing that he will shoot again and succeed, the girl
engages the killer in the title duel; dying, he says that he loves her.

The morals of this movie are:

(a) A woman of propriety does not feel sexual desire.

(b) A woman who is sexually aware is a Jezebel, a threat to the welfare
of the men she encounters.

(c) A man who gives way to sexual temptation will not long stay his hand
from murder.

The film is made well enough to produce catharsis. If it achieves a coherence
that can be reflected in the viewer's cognitive and emotional system, that
coherence is invisible to me. Its morals appear to support such common
psychodynamic defenses as denial.

Support for the notion that Hollywood invented entertainment comes from
a (to me) surprising source, Neal Gabler's (1988) history of Jewish power
in the industry. Several first or second generation immigrants from central
and eastern Europe, raised in poverty, became heads of studios. To compensate
for their exclusion from the American upper class, "they would fabricate
their empire in the image of America... They would create its values and
myths, its traditions and archetypes. It would be an America where fathers
were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful,
and decent. This was their America, and its invention may be their
most enduring legacy" (p. 6); "in a sense, they colonized the
American imagination" (p. 7). The body of this book is at the level
of gossip, and the idea is not original with Gabler. Whether or not he
is correct in his assertion that outsiders ran Hollywood, and only outsiders
would bother to concoct the myth (p. I 19), he is surely correct in his
description of the vision that Hollywood projected. Many films released
by Hollywood between 1925 and 1955 were mere diversion; a fair proportion
were perverse. None, I think, were art But some were entertainment, purporting
to demonstrate what could be achieved by persons of strong character.

19. MacLean (1990) cites Groos (189611915) as originating the notion that
animal play consists in the acting out of instincts before they are needed.
He cites himself (1978 etc.) for the notion that play improves "harmony
in the nest" and "affiliation among members of social groups"
(p. 397). The latter is relevant to my thesis.

20. Evil is often imagined to be elegant, clever, or aristocratic. In Gounod's
Faust , Mephistopheles introduces himself with

("Have I not assumed your form? A sword at my side, a feather in my
hat, a full purse, a rich cloak on my shoulder; in short, a true gentleman!"
Barbier & Carre 1859; translation by DGH.)

Eichmann, leader of the Holocaust, turned out to be a dull bureaucrat.
Banality is conventionality, predictability, conformity to a familiar type.
Arendt (1963-1964) uses the expression "banality of evil" in
her last sentence, and perhaps not before. As best I can judge, she means
to emphasize the inferiority of Eichmann to Mephistopheles.

21. After science died, around 1900, what followed proved superior in explanatory
power. Likewise, in my opinion, the best of the work of painters and sculptors
since impressionism has been superior to Art in the sense that it induced
deeper, further-reaching reorganization in the healthy, initiated audience.
That a portion of 20th-century work is perverse is another issue. But I
wish to emphasize that Balanchine's ballets are, at least, Art, and sometimes
more than that. The remarkable aspect of Balanchine's oeuvre is that he
did not give up emotional power in order to work at a new rank.

22. The list of references below is not limited to works that I have consulted
in preparing this paper. It includes also works that are cited by my sources
and necessary for the reader. Substantial work on dance by anthropologists,
which the reader might deem relevant, is not cited.

Arendt, H. (1963/1964) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality
of Evil. New York: Viking Press, rev. & enl.

Bland, A. (1976) A History of Ballet and Dance in the Western World.
New York: Praeger Publishers.

Boulos. (1939) "The Evolution of the Academic Dance." The
Dancing Times, n.s. 345, 265-268, 272 (June). Translated from the French
by W. G. Hartog.

Braudel, Fernand (1982) Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-l8th Century.
Vol. 2: The Wheels of Commerce. Harper & Row, New York, 1982. Translated
by Sian Reynolds. Originally published by Librairie Armand Colin, Paris,
1979, as Les Jeux de l'Echange. The title of the book (Jeux) refers to
games, speculation.

Wright, Q. (1942) A Study of War. 2 vols. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. 2d ed (1965), 1 vol, with a Commentary on War since 1942.

Zuboff, S. (1988) In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work
and Power. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Acknowledgements

I thank William L. Benzon for valuable discussions over many years; Janet
A. Hays for suggestions; Martha Mills for a close reading of a manuscript;
Shirley A. Bradfield for permission to watch her making dances; Marianne
Schapal for early encouragement; and the New York Public Library, in particular
the Dance Collection at Lincoln Center. John M. Roberts published many
papers on expressive culture; reading them strengthened my interest in
the topic.